"We just got lost," an older man with a bronchial cough told me one cold dawn, after he and his four underdressed companions, loitering at a highway intersection, had been searched and ushered into a Border Patrol SUV. "The stars-the stars were our map at night, but look at the clouds. Look at the sky." It was impervious, and had been for the past two nights.

Once, I lay on my stomach in a mesquite thicket, waiting with two agents for a group of four that had tripped a sensor. The agents yelled and leaped forward only when the men were within ten feet; the group seized up and went submissively slack in a single motion. After the pat-down, one man began ruefully emptying from his pockets a collection of pretty rocks; for some reason, the agents and I looked away. Walking back to the truck, the men began heedlessly climbing a barbed-wire fence; one of the agents gave them a patient lesson in how to scale it. Another time, a guy whose group had been spotted from the air sociably handed an agent a big rattle and said he'd killed a six-foot snake. The agent examined the rattle deferentially, shook it, said, "That's a big snake," returned the rattle, walked the group of men to his truck, and locked them in the back.

Now McCarson and a few other senior agents were leaning against an SUV, watching the junior agents, who were watching the detainees finish their food. I was thinking that as trackers follow illegal immigrants, often right at the mesmerizing limit of what they can detect, they're mustering up the emotions and sensations of mercurial imaginary travelers, and then the imaginary is suddenly, alienatingly replaced by the real: men physically homogenized by days in the brush, all with the same propulsive need. It's a need no Border Patrol tracker will ever be able to identify with. Before the twelve men finished eating, McCarson walked back to his truck and radioed Brackettville to see if anything else was pending.

Jeff Tietz is a contributing writer at Rolling Stone. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Atlantic Monthly.

One day a friend of mine called and told me to read an essay on tracking that had incongruously appeared on the op-ed page of a newspaper. It was a very short essay, but its author had fit in many of the elements that make tracking wondrous. I saw that the craft was ancient and sophisticated and beautiful; I also recognized the possibility that its tiny mechanics could be shown in action: as smugglers ran south, shooting over their shoulders; as trails led to corpses; as trackers, racing after guides, repeatedly overcame improvised subterfuges.

The facts I learned in Brackettville were dispiriting. Chasing live trails usually involved a mute guy hurrying randomly through the middle of nowhere. He would be, understandably, very hard-pressed to explain what he was doing. He would also be very unlikely to catch anybody himself, because many widely dispersed agents collaborated on apprehensions. Apprehensions tended to be sedate and perfunctory. Real-time chases between smugglers and trackers almost never occurred. The chance of discovering a dead body in terrain with shade and seasonal streams and windmill wells was basically zero.

I went out with Border Patrol agents for probably ten full shifts, asking questions all the time. I learned a lot about strategy and logistics, but systematic instruction in sign cutting is a foreign idea in the Border Patrol, and incompatible with chasing people. I took my besides-the-point notes home and began working hard to make myself believe in them.

After a few weeks of extracting staged action and pretend insights from my notebooks, I was forced to admit that I hadn't actually seen anything. I needed to go back and get lessons. Ten days, however, was right at the limit of bureaucratic tolerance. It also seemed improbable that the Border Patrol would pull its best trackers off live trails and/or give away many hours of senior-agent manpower in order to provide me with intensive training. The only thing I could think of was to try and get permission to go out with McCarson again, perhaps by claiming that I needed just a few more facts for my story, and then pester him for special instruction on slow days. It worked, and before long came the moment when, for no knowable reason, multiple pieces of sign appeared to me as a single constellation.

Stephen J. Dubner

The Silver Thief

from The New Yorker

Sometime during the early hours of January 29, 2002, a great deal of sterling silver vanished from a mansion near Rhinebeck, New York. The mansion, known as Edgewater, was built in 1823 and for decades was the home of a family named Donaldson. Its current owner is Richard Jenrette, a retired financier whose hobby is preserving historic homes. Jenrette takes his hobby seriously. He once tracked down the last living Donaldson descendant, who had moved to the south of Spain, and persuaded her to repatriate the family's original silver to Edgewater. This included a flatware set decorated with the Donaldson crest (a raven perched on rocks) and a dozen teaspoons, each engraved with a sign of the zodiac (a bow to the Victorian interest in astrology, and a playful means of marking the seating arrangement). All of these items were stolen, as were a toddy ladle and a fish server, luncheon knives and demitasse spoons, a chocolate pot, and a six-piece tea set-many of which were designed by such fine silver makers as Tiffany, Gorham, and Martin-Guillaume Biennais.

The mansion also had Gilbert Stuart paintings and antique porcelain, but these had not been taken, and some of the lesser silver was left behind. Furthermore, the alarm had not been tripped. The burglar had gingerly pried the wooden molding from the glass panes of an exterior door, removed the glass, and shimmied inside, thereby failing to break the alarm contacts on the door. Jenrette, who was at his winter home in St. Croix when his caretaker phoned with the news, speculated that the burglar had some kind of inside connection, or had at least visited the mansion. Edgewater was occasionally open to tour groups, and Jenrette had recently held a fund-raising party for Hillary Clinton that drew several hundred people. He wondered if perhaps one of the guests-or, more likely, some guest's hard-up nephew or brother-in-law who had been told of the party-had broken into the grand, remote house along the Hudson River.

That night, there was another burglary, ten miles south of Edge-water, at Wilderstein, the former home of Daisy Suckley, who was a distant cousin and close companion of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Suckley gave the president his famous Scottish terrier, Fala.) Again, the haul was silver, and the job was equally meticulous. The method of entry was the same. Wilderstein had an interior motion detector, which somehow had been evaded.

The state troopers in Rhinebeck realized that they were dealing with a specialist. The burglar left no fingerprints or clues. There wasn't much to do except alert the antiques publications, the auction houses, and the Times, which ran a brief article about the burglaries.

Nearly two weeks later, Cornell Abruzzini, a police detective in Greenwich, Connecticut, was having his morning coffee when a colleague stopped by with the Times article. "Doesn't this sound like the silver guy you nailed?" he asked. Abruzzini read the article, then called Rhinebeck and said, with barely an introduction, "I know the guy who's doing your burglaries."

Abruzzini told Tom Fort, the trooper who was handling the case, the name of the thief: Blane Nordahl. But Nordahl had in recent years used various aliases, which included David Price and Robert Demiani. Abruzzini advised Fort to check the local motels for all three names. On his tenth try, at a Super 8 several miles south of Rhinebeck, the trooper got lucky. A man called David Price had paid cash for a room. Miraculously, the clerk had done what motel clerks are supposed to do with a cash customer: taken down information on his car-a Cadillac Seville-and photocopied his driver's license. The picture on David Price's license was of Blane Nordahl. He had checked out more than a week earlier.